What do atheists mean when they talk about religion?

[struggle4progress]

Rowan Williams
ABC Religion and Ethics
13 Apr 2012

In Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, the tormented and indeterminate hero - or rather, anti-hero - Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin is asked at one point whether he believes in god or not, and his reply is characteristically inconclusive. But, he says, what troubles him is that the atheist always seems to be talking about "something else."

"The essence of religious feeling does not fall under the province of any reasoning, or any crimes and misdemeanours, or any atheist doctrines; there's something else here, and it will always be something else, there is something that atheist doctrines will eternally glide over and they will eternally be speaking of 'something else'."

I want to try here to identify what that "something else" is that atheists seem to be talking about. In other words, what do they think it is that they are talking about when they talk about religious belief and practice? Because I don't think it is very much use carrying on with the current discussion unless we have clarified what they think they mean.

Let me suggest that there are two things that atheists think they are talking about, and two ways in which they construe the notion of religious belief and practice. The first is that religion is a kind of strategy; the second is that religion is a kind of explanation ...

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/04/13/3476269.htm

This article was referenced in the article linked in another OP here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/121825688

[Goblinmonger]

1. The archbishop can go fuck himself.

Last edited Tue May 8, 2012, 08:35 AM - Edit history (1)

How demeaning is that?

Let me suggest that there are two things that atheists think they are talking about...

I'm sure if this was said about gays, or blacks, or Jews by a non-member of that club it would be equally well received by progressives.

[struggle4progress]

2. You're a such cheery sunbeam today!

[Goblinmonger]

3. Oh, I'm sorry.

Thank you for telling me what I was really thinking, Archbishop. How wonderful of you to point out what this undecipherable cluster of thoughts in my head actually means. How could I possibly continue without your help?

What if he said something like "Let me tell you what women are REALLY thinking when they say something"?

[darkstar3]

20. You've certainly got this one pegged.

[rug]

19. If I keep reading here I can get rid of all of my cats.

[2ndAmForComputers]

42. Goblinmonger's answer was the correct one.

[djean111]

5. Thank you.

What thoroughly insulting suggestions.
It's so easy - if I am asked, I say I don't believe in a god, therefore I am not religious. No need to explain or apologise.
I know what I am thinking and what I am talking about.
I spend absolutely zero time wondering why others are religious. I only think about that when atheism is questioned, or someone is trying to convert me.
Play amongst yourselves.
Oh, and as far as I can tell, most questions about atheism are just ways of trying to convert atheists to being religious.
Belief and non-belief. So very simple.

[madmom]

15. I caught that also, and decided to read no further.

[intaglio]

4. Personally I follow the Loftus line

Religion is the assumption that non- and extra- corporeal agents or agencies exist. There seems to be a general view that such agents or agencies can affect human life and can in some way be appeased, but that is not universal. The agents or agencies can include human souls, ghosts or spirits.

[djean111]

6. I believe in spirits, but

do not worship them. They can affect my life. So can my next door neighbor.
No element of "religion" at all.

[intaglio]

8. Religions don't have to include worship

That is why I didn't include that term.

Now you do not view your faith/belief as a religion, but believing in Spirits affecting you means, I suspect, that you make comments for their "hearing" and that there might be small prayers for assistance. Now, at base, that is what makes the bona fide religions of Spiritualism and Animism.

[djean111]

9. Actually, no. I don't.

And any time this sort of subject comes up, it seems to be, at the heart of it, some sort of attempt to push atheists into some variation of religion. Anyway, all just definitions - I consider believing in a "god with powers" is religion. Worshiping anything, I supposed, can be pushed or pulled into some variation of "religion".
No worship here, no conversations or expectations. I had an NDE, and for me, worship of a god is out of the question.
Calling what I feel "religious" is disingenuous. These conversations are about whether someone worships a higher power.
And I don't consider I have faith or belief, just a calm knowledge of what happened to me personally. Other opinions about that seem silly at best.

Don't feel you need to label everything. Doesn't work for anyone but yourself.

[Silent3]

23. That "calm knowledge" of something that many people would find disputable...

...makes what you're talking about a belief, a form of faith, whether you wish to call it that or not.

Calling it "something that happened to me personally" doesn't change that. Experience and interpretation of experience are two different things. If you interpret your experience as having provided you with knowledge of the existence of anything that might be called a "spirit", then you've entered into the realm of faith and belief.

That's not the same as religion, I'll grant you, but it's certainly a related area of human thought.

[djean111]

25. but it doesn't matter if others find it disputable.

In the nicest way possible, others don't count.
I don't feel I've "interpreted" something, I feel that something happened to me.
It is as real to me as any other experience, like driving a car or shutting a door.
It happened.
I am not sure why some must insist on shoving everything into little boxes so that they can claim we all are religious in some way.
Since religion, or lack of religion, is not any sort of tribal divider for me, (hmmm, maybe liberal and conservative are, methinks), I just don't get the insistence on faith and belief. Actually, I think it cheapens or minimizes the beliefs of people who honestly are religious.
The thinking gets a bit byzantine, but in the ends sounds a bit to me like "John has red hair, and is religious. You have red hair, too, so you must also be religious."

[Silent3]

26. Part of what makes religion religion...

Last edited Wed May 9, 2012, 03:36 PM - Edit history (1)

...as I see it is the belief that "others don't count", that what you think you know and feel inside is paramount. It's hardly the only thing that makes religion religion, but as I see religion it's a part of it.

What is faith but dismissing the need for proof? And what is not caring what others find disputable but one form of dismissing any need or concern for proof?

One of the greatest breakthroughs of scientific thinking was realizing that consensus is important, not because truth is something that has to be voted on, or because you want to impress your neighbors, but because scientists recognized how fallible we are, how easily we fool and mislead ourselves, that making how "real" or "true" and experience feels your standard for deciding what is or is not true is a terribly flawed standard.

[djean111]

27. No matter how you twist it and turn it,

I do not need proof. I am dismissing your need for proof. Why would I need consensus on such a personal experience?
And kind of funny, dragging science into whether one is religious or not!

[Silent3]

28. Your personal lack of need for proof is the very point I'm making.

That's called faith, and that doesn't taking "twisting" to call that faith. Your dismissal of any need for proof is well in keeping how the religious treat their religious beliefs.

Why would you need consensus? To determine if you are interpreting your experiences correctly. Saying that you now know there are spirits is an interpretation of experience, not experience itself.

If you don't care, you don't care. That's your business. But I call that not caring a form of faith, and it doesn't take any stretching of the meaning of the word "faith" to apply it here.

Why "drag" science into this? Because it's nearly the opposite thing of having faith and taking personal experience at face value.

Yet somehow I don't think you can get past repeating that you know what you've experienced, you know what it means, you don't care what anyone else thinks, you don't care about proving it... and you'll somehow expect that another reiteration of those things should make the issues of faith and semi-religious belief go away, stunned that I don't see it as obvious.

[djean111]

32. You are getting a bit shrill and nonsensical.

and I think it hysterically funny that you think I would be stunned by anything you have said.
You will never know what another person is thinking, really.
You may have an assumption, a guess, or a preconceived notion.
And, um, you keep reiterating the faith meme as if it differs each time.
No, I don't expect anything, I am just stating how I feel.
Bit presumptuous of you to tell me what I am thinking, n'est-ce pas?
And you are quite wrong.
The stunned thing does make me smile, though.

[Silent3]

36. Whether you'd consider yourself "stunned" is hardly central to what I'm saying

In fact, your whole reply here is just wasted on a superfluous part of what I said (using Fox News-like distractions such as calling what I said "shrill&quot while handily evading dealing with the faith issue.

[tama]

37. How fallible

your "consensus", how easily it fools and misleads itself.... faith in numbers...

It's very easy - and unsurprising - to tell others to doubt their experiences, especially when those are not in perfect unison with MY perception of consensus reality. Instead of doubting MY own experience and explanation of what is "true".

If you really want to teach doubting, teach by example starting from you own beliefs...

(PS: there is degree of "consensus" in every shared way of life, and that consensus is not limited to human communities alone, But no consensus is the whole of the truth, there is allways Something Else besides any individual or collective point of view...

[Silent3]

38. How much doubt does doubt require?

I should doubt that the existence of "spirits" is doubtful? I suppose I do, a little, but not so much that doubt is circularly chasing its own tail.

Thinking the evidence isn't convincing for something hardly constitutes much of a "belief", especially when that thing has a long history of failure, fakery, and ever-slippery definitions when the old definitions don't hold up any more, etc.

Oh, and stop trying to repress me.

[tama]

39. OK

Instead of trying to repress you I'll put you on ignore.

[Silent3]

40. Works for me. n/t

[AlbertCat]

33. just a calm knowledge of what happened to me personally.

Of course, the very IDEA that such a thing as a spirit exists is not your own idea. It was fed to you from birth. It was formulated in prehistory by the profoundly ignorant to explain something not understood at the time.

Perhaps you have rejected other nonspiritual and supernatural explanations for whatever happened to you. But you co-opted the idea of spirits from....


religion!

[djean111]

34. Well, no

my family, when I told them years later, was a bit horrified.
And the experience turned me away from religion.
How on earth did you get the idea that you can state with certainty what my childhood was like?
Shaky ground to base an assertion on, luv.

[AlbertCat]

35. How on earth did you get the idea that you can state with certainty what my childhood was like?

I can state with almost certainty that the very concept of spirits was all around you from the moment of your birth. Even if it was the denial of such things.... the concept is still fed to you. (you can't deny something you know nothing of) Most likely before you can even remember. You did not think of such a concept all by yourself. Unless you were completely and totally segregated from religious things all your life. I doubt strongly you were. These notions are part of our very language... literature, idioms, movies, TV, etc. etc.... Directly or indirectly, it comes from very ancient religion. A strong meme.


So, have you exhausted ALL OTHER possibilities before you landed on "spirits"?

[AlbertCat]

30. Personally I follow the Loftus line

Yes!

I didn't reject religion per say (I never thought much of it or even about it from childhood). I reject anything supernatural. Period.

If it exists in this universe, it does so because the laws of physics (whatever they are) allow it, and the circumstances (no matter how improbable) have come together to allow whatever it is to exist.

It's not hard to understand.

[trotsky]

7. Of course it's always "something else."

Every time a religious statement or position is actually clarified and defined, an atheist can easily rip it to shreds. So the theist's defense is "well, I actually meant something else."

[dmallind]

10. Two answers, Bish.

1) We respond to how the word is used. If you want to define and focus the response, define and focus the term better among your co-religionists first.

2) We respond to its real contingent application. This is where the supposedly "more sophisticated" theologians get their noses up their own asses in thinking that it's the fault of atheists that we respond to more basic ideas of God than their increasingly ineffable trumpery. When every church, every religious snake oil mountebank, every Sunday morning Metatron on the political talk shows starts referring to God as not a being but the ground of Being, then we'll respond to that. It's no use superciliously whining that atheists almost always respond to big-beardy-in-the-sky images instead when you haven't managed in 2000 years to get more than 0.01% of your believers past that view, your Excellency. When they start using sophisticated theology (beyond parrotting your bogus minge that we don't "understand" it) in their political lobbying, in their evangelism, in their PR, in their preaching, then we'll start responding to it.

[trotsky]

12. I want to Rec this post about a billion times.

Perfect.

[Silent3]

21. +6.022×10²³! n/t

[Plantaganet]

41. n/t

[Jim__]

11. "Something else" is an ingenious way of saying it.

Not only about what atheists glide over but what we all glide over.

Religion is a type of survival mechanism. It's a way to sensibly cope with a nonsensical condition. We can't win and we can't refuse to play the game. Religion is the hope that we are wrong. Everyone has that hope even though we don't all put the same label on it. The "argument" is really just about labels. What the hell, we have to pass the time somehow.

[pennylane100]

13. As an atheist, I have a very clear message that I want every religious person to hear.

Stop letting atheists subsidize your religion. Pay your fair share of all state and federal taxes.

Do not worry about what or how we construe the notion of religious beliefs and practices. Be more concerned that you are just a bunch of freeloaders who have no problem letting atheists pick up the tab for your tax exempt existence.

Then if you feel the need to clarify what you think we, as atheists, mean, when we think about religion. You will then have to listen to what people like me think you mean when justifying your beliefs and practices. Trust me, you will not like what you hear.

[bongbong]

18. You hit the point!

The transmutation of "spiritual" into "religion" occurred 12.4 microseconds after somebody dug up the first gold nugget.

[mr blur]

14. Typical arrogant theist bullshit.

and typical of this loudmouthed clown.

[stopbush]

16. What do people who don't collect stamps "believe" about stamp collecting?

[Goblinmonger]

17. Well, whatever it is

it isn't what they think they think it is.

[edcantor]

22. But then again, there are those that don't now collect stamps but...

used to collect them. Some simply lost interest, others found out that each stamp was kind of small and thin and fragile and pretty much worthless.

[mr blur]

24. Do you mean "Progressive" Stamp Collecting? nt

[AlbertCat]

31. You just don't understand other ways of collecting.